Attacks that target web application resources are often difficult to detect, and when these attacks go undetected, the results can be costly for enterprises and end users. To mitigate the risks a compromise poses to their reputation and ongoing operations, enterprises have increasingly turned to web application firewalls to protect their web properties and enforce the security and privacy of their web applications. In contrast to intrusion prevention systems, which may interrogate traffic against signatures and anomalies, web application firewalls may interrogate the behavior and logic of what is being requested and returned at a web server. As a result, web application firewalls may protect against various types of evasive attacks, such man-in-the middle attacks, SQL injection attacks, and cross-site scripting attacks.
While web application firewalls may provide protection from various types of crippling attacks, traditional web applications firewalls may be inefficient and inflexible. For example, because the processing involved in interrogating the behavior and logic of web-server requests may be computationally expensive, web application firewalls may degrade network throughput. Traditional web application firewalls may also lack the flexibility to adapt to changing network demands and security threat levels. The instant disclosure, therefore, identifies and addresses a need for improved systems and methods for protecting resources via web application firewalls.